


And the Geese Are Headed North Again

by yekoc



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Marriage of Convenience, PTSD, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Canon, Recovery (of sorts), Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Spring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-17 01:55:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11265546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yekoc/pseuds/yekoc
Summary: In the dark and honest part of her that Sansa is no longer afraid of, she had thought that Jon would die, and she was no sadder than she was relieved. In the months that she ruled Winterfell while the great war of men and wights waged around them, she felt herself growing into her power, sinking her roots back deep into the Northern soil. She enjoyed it, ruling. She was good at it. And at night, she had a wide bed and a door that locked and she was never cold. If Jon died in the war, she would miss him like she missed Robb and Rickon and Bran. She wouldn’t miss her husband.Seeing him now, she notes the absence of the relief and joy that marked her first glimpse of him at Castle Black. Instead, she feels a too-familiar grief: my brother is gone.(This story is now complete! Please read Author's Notes at the end for additional warnings)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to N, who knows who she is (and who wrote the best single line in this story).
> 
> Title is from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TB3Rr-fozM).

The Jon who comes back to Winterfell after the wars is not the same Jon. The new Jon has a scar that slices cruelly across his left cheek, ruining the eyebrow on that side, and he walks with a limp. Where the old Jon looked tired, the new Jon looks half-dead, stumbling where he stands. Instead of Sansa’s bastard half-brother, this Jon is a Targaryen, a Stark, a prince, a king, maybe even a god. And he is Sansa’s husband.

They had married in the godswood the day he left, a hurried ceremony that Sansa spent pushing back the creeping memories of previous weddings. She barely remembers saying the words, or the claustrophobic weight of the cloak on her shoulders. Jon had kissed her on the forehead, a cold press of lips, and left. 

In the dark and honest part of her that Sansa is no longer afraid of, she had thought that Jon would die, and she was no sadder than she was relieved. In the months that she ruled Winterfell while the great war of men and wights waged around them, she felt herself growing into her power, sinking her roots back deep into the Northern soil. She enjoyed it, ruling. She was good at it. And at night, she had a wide bed and a door that locked and she was never cold. If Jon died in the war, she would miss him like she missed Robb and Rickon and Bran. She wouldn’t miss her husband.

Seeing him now, she notes the absence of the relief and joy that marked her first glimpse of him at Castle Black. Instead, she feels a too-familiar grief: my brother is gone. 

***

It had been Sansa’s idea to marry, once they learned the truth about Jon’s parentage. 

“It won’t be perfect,” she said, “but it’ll be something. The last Stark can’t be an unmarried woman, Jon, not if I want to keep Winterfell--” and Jon had sighed, and nodded. Done his duty. The words would not keep her safe--she knew better by then--but they would serve, at least, to stymie a third who might dress his cruelty and his maneuvering in the garb of custom, and call it marriage.

***

In the material ways, it works. There is a Stark in Winterfell. Repairs, interrupted by the loss of able-bodied men to the wars, are starting up again. Slowly, Sansa sees less of the lingering stain of Ramsay Bolton and more of the home she had loved. She orders the kennels torn down and a garden planted in their place, just steps from the kitchens. 

She points it out to Jon, the day after his return, as they walk towards the Great Hall, Ghost padding silently behind them. The night before, he’d said barely a word to her, eating little and drinking less, retiring as soon as all the men had had a chance to lay eyes on him and see that he’d come back alive. Sansa is not sure where he slept.

“That was a good idea,” Jon says now, and Sansa wants to say _I know it was_. She bites her tongue. It hadn’t been easy to talk to the old Jon, even caught up in the joy of seeing him again, but it suddenly feels impossible. _Who are you?_ she wants to ask. Instead, she swallows and points out where the scaffolding is coming down around the rebuilt armory. 

When they greet petitioners in the Great Hall, Brandon Norrey, a minor landholder who has already come three times to ask Sansa to send the men she doesn’t have to help defend his holding from ‘thieving wildling scum,’ ignores her and kneels, with more slimy obeisance than he ever showed Sansa, at Jon’s feet. When he makes the same request a fourth time, Sansa looks straight ahead. 

“As you yourself acknowledge,” says Jon, softly, “you’ve already asked this of Lady Stark. And she has given an answer. More than once. If you think she can be convinced to change it, you’re welcome to ask her again.” The familiar Northern burr threads through his words. At his feet, Ghost licks a lazy paw. Lord Norrey’s eyes go wide and he looks at Sansa, attempts an ungainly, thin-limbed scramble across the floor on his knees. 

“You’re in luck, Lord Norrey,” says Sansa, making her voice clipped where Jon’s was soft and rough. “We have fighting men back in Winterfell now.”

“Thank you, my lady--” the man starts, but Sansa isn’t finished.

“Of course, my husband’s remaining forces are made up primarily of Wildlings. Still, I hear Tormund Giantsbane is an open-minded, forgiving sort of man. If you’d like, you may take your request to him directly.”

“I don’t--” Norrey says.

“You are dismissed,” says Sansa. From the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees Jon’s mouth twitch. She settles herself, hands resting on the smooth worn arms of her father’s chair, and calls for the next petitioner. 

***

Tormund roars his approval when he hears the story, three nights later, banging his one remaining hand so hard down on the table that his flagon of ale spills. 

It’s the first time that Jon has stayed at table until the last dishes are cleared away and the soldiers have left the hall. Sansa can hear echoes of her mother’s voice, reminding her that ladies must leave for a sitting room and sew or talk quietly, let the men have their time to drink and jape together. But Brienne, who rode in that morning from the Riverlands, shows no indication of getting up, and Sansa will not depart quietly and leave Jon to sit alone, ahead the great table. 

“I wish the old cunt would have asked me,” Tormund says. “It’s been too long since I scared the shit out of one of you kneelers. Wights and walkers don’t _startle_ like flesh and blood do.” He grins, a wild-eyed baring of teeth that would have sent the child Sansa crying into Old Nan’s skirts. Now, Jon gives a laugh that sounds like it was surprised out of hiding, and Sansa is surprised to feel only a brief, hot flash of tenderness. 

She has not seen Jon smile since he came back, she realizes. She can count on one hand the number of times she’s seen him smile since they were children--and not so many times even then. Mostly, it was when he was with Arya. Mostly, she was the one making him frown. 

She’s grateful when Brienne’s voice pulls her out of her thoughts. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of us to scare up at Last Hearth,” she says, “ _Lord_ Giantsbane,” and Tormund turns so red his face half-disappears into his hair. 

“Don’t call me that,” he mutters, and Brienne snorts.

“I think you’re a kneeler yourself by definition now, My Lord. Or is Last Hearth not pledged to Winterfell anymore? Did you declare your independence? Because I don’t think I can take another miserable petty shit of a war just yet, I don’t know about you all, but I’ll need a month or two at least before we ruin the world of men again just after we’ve saved it--”

“Oh, I can be a kneeler all right,” says Tormund, recovering, “for the right woman, aye, I’ll get down on my knees faster than you can say ‘wildfire,’” and now Brienne is the one turning red and hastily gulping from her flagon of ale. Jon laughs another startled laugh and Tormund leers wickedly and Sansa realizes, now, why her mother said the women were supposed to leave. 

She thinks about it later, in her room, alone and with the door locked. She knows--she tries not to remember--that women can do that for men, of course, but the other way around, she’s never--

She has a sudden, vivid flash of Tormund, sinking down onto his knees before Brienne, pulling down those trousers she always wears, her fingers digging into his red mane. Sansa feels hot and shy and wanting, in a way she hasn’t ever, not for years, and she pushes the image out of her mind and turns over, stretches out so that she takes up the whole wide empty bed. She evens out her breathing determinedly, thinks of nothing, and takes much longer than usual to fall asleep. 

***

The days after that ease into something that starts to feel like maybe it could be normal--walking with Jon to note the progress of the repairs, watching the sprigs of green poke up from the new kitchen gardens, hearing the complaints of minor lords and beginning to sort out the tangled mess of the North left in the wake of the great wars. Sansa isn’t scared, and when her waves of sadness come--when she sees the tower Bran loved to climb, or remembers hearing Arya’s voice echo too loudly across the covered walkways--they’re the almost-sweet ache of pressing on a bruise, no longer the sharp ragged pain of an open wound. 

The hardest thing, now, is Jon. They spend almost the entire day together every day, save for the hours he spends on the training field. She is an equal partner--often more than equal--in decisions about everything from the day to day running of Winterfell to the shifting political landscape of the rebuilding Westeros. She can remember the fear of those first days after his arrival, that he might displace her, claim Winterfell, claim _her_ , for his own. She can still hear, when she lets herself think back to it, the loud roar of the Northern lords calling Jon’s name. The glint in Littlefinger’s eye, and the cold certainty that, because her own name was not the one ringing through her father’s hall, she must choose one man or the other to belong to.

But Jon is careful and gentle and deferring, in public, and in private he barely speaks to her. 

It’s not, Sansa thinks, a mean silence or even a cold one. It’s as though he doesn’t know what to say, in the brief moments they spend alone during their long days together in the Great Hall or meeting with advisors. Sometimes, when she asks him a question, it takes him long seconds to answer--as though he’s being pulled back from somewhere very far away, his black eyes wide and lost. 

He _died_ , she thinks sometimes. There are things that have happened to her that must be unimaginable for Jon, she knows, but at least she’s told them to him. And it did--it helped, to say them out loud, to share them even in the smallest way. She has no idea, really, what memories Jon is stumbling through when he gets so lost. 

She brings it up with Tormund, once, catches him alone as he’s taking a watch on the battlements. 

“Aye, we saw some gods-cursed awful shit out there,” says Tormund. “Nightmares fucking coming to life. I dream about it, sure,” and Sansa knows that too, what it’s like to relive your worst horrors every night.

“But I’m alive,” says Tormund, “and there’s meat and drink and women, and life, and that makes up for it, mostly. Maybe it’s easier for me, being Free Folk. I always knew nightmares were real. Already learned how to find the parts of all this shit that make it worth fucking waking up again.”

Sansa has her own reasons to wake up every morning: the slow, beautiful work of rebuilding Winterfell, the peace of the godswood in the spring mornings. And, in the dark true part of her, the memory of Ramsay’s shrieks as his dogs bit his face off.

Jon--she’s not sure what Jon has. The work that he’s sharing with her, the work that was hers first. The training, the fighting, which must be mostly an echo of all of the nightmares in the first place. The half-told story of the family he’d always wanted and lost before he even knew he had it. 

Before the war, Jon had his command of the Night’s Watch, and his brief tenure as King in the North, and, overlaying both of those, the driving knowledge of the evil that was coming for men--a knowledge that left no room for purposelessness. Perhaps, Sansa thinks, Jon liked commanding the Watch. But she knew him in that role only briefly. And in the weeks before he left Winterfell and married her, weeks that brought his kingship and the knowledge of his parentage like two ravens on the same wind, she saw him start out glowing and proud and grow slowly quieter, worried, half-huddled under his black furs, as though braced against the cold. 

Sansa thinks now of what she hadn't then: how a boy who wanted only to sit at the same table as his parents took on more and more of their legacies, became everything people asked him to be, and it still did not bring him back to his family.

***  
One morning, when the new kitchen garden is a full riot of green, a raven comes, and Jon’s face lights up.

“What is it?” Sansa asks, curious, and he turns to her, scar twisting angrily with the way he’s starting to smile.

“It’s from Oldtown,” he says, “it’s Sam, he’s not needed there anymore, he’s coming here. He’ll be our Maester--” and then he catches himself visibly, pulling up.

“If that’s alright with you, I mean,” says Jon, and Sansa holds back a sigh. It is still so hard with Jon, tentative and alien and grudging where it’s easy with Brienne and Tormund and even the common folk she talks to throughout the day. 

“Of course,” she answers, trying not to sound exasperated. “He’s your friend, Jon, I’ll be happy to have him. And gods know we need a Maester, what with the three-- is it four, now? -- babes to be born before long. And the injuries on the training field, it’s a miracle no one’s died from a rotten wound yet.” She can hear her voice running on, nervous. 

Jon looks relieved, but Sansa’s not finished. “And I want to meet him,” she says, “most of all. I know he’s your friend, your best friend, but I don’t know much else. I’d like to know more about him,” she finished awkwardly, but Jon’s smiling again.

“Well, you’ll never meet someone who looks less likely to have killed a White Walker,” says Jon.

“Go on, then,” Sansa says, “tell me the whole story,” and Jon does. The story takes him away, a little bit, but Sansa stays with him when he goes there, and he comes back easily this time, laughing and shaking his head in lingering dismay at Sam’s unlikely slayer-hood.

Jon smiles enough that she stops keeping count, that day, and Sansa only realizes that she’s doing the same when her cheeks start to hurt over dinner. 

***

Sansa finds that, like Jon, she’s started counting down the days to Sam’s arrival. Tormund has left, half-reluctantly, for the Last Hearth, and Brienne is busy with all the duties of a master-at-arms. Sometimes in the morning Sansa asks Jon for more stories about the Night’s Watch, but those are just as likely to take him somewhere dark as they are to be enjoyable, and she misses having other people around. Company. Sometimes she thinks she can see a ghost-Winterfell imposed over this new one, echoing with the bustling life of a working castle and a large family. At night, she finds herself missing her childhood nursery and the feeling of Arya, pressing her cold feet to Sansa’s stomach on purpose in the middle of the night. 

Sam, she thinks, will help. 

And she is right--mostly. When he finally arrives, the fattest, sweatiest, kindest-looking Maester she’s ever seen, Jon drops his sword on the practice field and runs to embrace him, half-lifting him in his exuberance. Sansa watches from a modest distance, feeling warm and glad. When Jon has finally let Sam go, he beckons her over, introducing them in a voice so proud that his Northern accent nearly triples. 

Sam is so eager to get started helping in any way he can that she can barely convince him to let her show him to his room and settle him in. She makes him swear he’ll take the time to rest and change and not come out until dinner--not because she wants to deprive Jon of his company but because she’s afraid if the poor man doesn’t nap now, he’ll fall asleep in the soup. 

When she explains that to Jon, he grins. “That’s Sam for you,” he says, “he’ll take care of every damn person except himself. Gods. So you really do like him, Sansa? Because if you don’t, I could-- we would--”

And he would send Sam away, she realizes. In a kind, gentle way, not far, maybe to Tormund or to Bear Island. But he’d send away his best friend in the world out of respect for her as the Lady of Winterfell. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” she says, brusque, and leaves to dress for dinner.

That night, Sansa sits at the high table between Jon and Sam, with Brienne on Jon’s other side, and lets herself fall into the stories that flow around her. Jon laughs almost as much as he talks, and Sam’s tales of the wonders of Oldtown remind her of listening to Old Nan’s stories. They all linger long after the final plates are cleared, and Sansa feels cozy and warm from the ale and the furs and Jon’s palpable enjoyment.

When Sam yawns in the middle of describing how he forged the third link in his Maester’s chain, Sansa rouses herself from her own near-slumber and makes her apologies. Brienne stands, stretching almost to the roofbeam above them, and then Jon rises as well.

“We’re glad to have you here, Sam,” he says, warm. “Goodnight, Brienne. Goodnight, Sansa.”

He leaves, Sansa lingering to put out the candles. She sees Sam glance between them, twice, but she’s too tired to think much about it. That night she sleeps deeply, and there are no nightmares.

***

It’s good to have a maester in Winterfell again. Women deal with their own birthing, mostly, but Alaya Ghent’s babe is breech and it’s likely that Sam’s presence saves its life along with its mother’s. Sansa, clenching her fingers against the moans of pain and smell of blood leaking from the birthing room, begins to relax when she sees Sam emerge, overawed, with a shrieking bundle in his arms. 

There is more than that: Sam takes charge of the ragtag murder of ravens in the tower, and suddenly messages come back faster from the new capital at Harrenhal, where Tyrion Lannister is attempting to forge the terms of a rebuilt alliance between Westeros’s seats of power. 

“He’s calling himself the Hand of Westeros,” says Sam, reading the latest message during what’s become a regular meeting for the three of them. “He signs it here, see?”

“Not a king,” says Sansa.

Jon picks up the tiny scroll and looks it over, itching idly at his scar. “No,” he says. “He talks here about the Wardens--not just of the major regions, but of all the seven kingdoms, plus the Iron Islands--?”

“It’s an idea he picked up in Essos, I think,” says Sam. “I’ve read about it, some. Think of it like -- well, what he says it is. A Hand for the whole country, but no seat of power of his own. He’s given up the Lannister lands. He says he’ll have no children. If the Wardens don’t like him, they can choose a new hand, provided they can all agree on who it is.”

“It makes sense,” says Jon. “Someone to negotiate disputes between the great regions, but no incentive to put his own family first.”

“He’ll be good at it,” says Sansa, and only faintly notices that she means it, and that there is no trace of rancor for the man who was once her husband; it seems like something that happened to another girl, a very long time ago. “He’s a fair man. Kind, I think.”

“Fair and kind,” says Sam happily. “Well, that’s more than they could say of Stannis Baratheon.”

“It sounds like Ned,” says Jon, softly. There is the usual tug of loss at the name.

“And the Wardens,” Sansa asks, so that she doesn’t have to think about the way Jon didn’t say ‘father.’ “Is he choosing them?”

“It’s a little unclear, but I think he just means the rulers of the regions,” says Sam. “Or maybe the ruler might choose a Warden to represent him? He seems to be using the term in a strictly diplomatic sense. So Jon, you’d be--”

“Sansa,” says Jon. “Sansa would be.”

“We’re married,” says Sansa. She looks straight ahead; she can hear the echo of her voice in the room. “Or had you forgotten? You are lord of Winterfell by law, and by Robb’s will, and more royal than I’ll ever be besides--”

The dark place inside her twists, edging into her words, and Sam can hear it. Sansa, from the corner of her vision, sees his eyes widen. Jon, though, just looks at her from across the table. His gaze is level, his black eyes steeped with something that she wants to call bitterness but can’t. 

“No,” Jon says, “Winterfell is Sansa’s, as it should be. She is the Stark in Winterfell: she kept it and its people whole and safe while I went off to kill. It belongs to her by blood, Robb’s will or no. I’ve been in charge of men, and died doing it, and I’m done with ruling, now, but Sansa--you’re good at it. If there’s need for a Warden, it should be you.”

“Well, there’s some precedent,” Sam is saying, and Sansa hears Mormont and Dorne-- Targaryens, of course, even Danaerys, so there’s no doubt that Lord Tyrion, is that what we’re to call him now--

But it’s hard to focus on the words, over the rush of the meltwater inside her, the pure relief of hearing Jon say it, even if she guessed, even if she knew that he would never try to take, to force--

And then once the waters have calmed, the sweet slow realization that she is proud, to hear Jon say that about her. Those words, in the burly syllables of her father and grandfather and the Starks before them. It feels like a crowning, a benediction.

Sam is still talking, but Jon is looking at Sansa. She gathers herself slowly, focusing. Here is Jon, with his head of wild curly hair already escaping its tie; with scar that’s becoming familiar, now, so much that she knows its twists and turns, the ways it japes with his face; his eyes that are calm and deep. 

She’s glad that’s he’s here, she realizes, and is surprised that it’s the first time she’s had the concrete thought--truly glad for his presence at her side, his quiet, unpushy support. She thinks of what it was like without him here and feels an echo of exhaustion she didn’t know until now was so long disappeared. 

Across the table, she smiles at him, and his lips quirk up, carefully, pleased. 

***

Sansa finds Sam in his small study, later. She tells herself she’s come to ask about a balm for Jon’s scar--she can see the way he scratches at it, even if it’s mostly habit now--but really she just wants to sit for a moment in this room from her childhood, with its dust motes and scrolls and the smell of moulding parchment.

“This might give him some relief,” Sam says, bustling back panting with a small jar. “Once nightly. I’ll write out a note,” and he heads to the desk for a quill.

While he’s rummaging, turned away from her, he clears his throat.

“Sam?” asks Sansa, checking, and when Sam turns around again he’s blushing and looking at the floor.

“Forgive my, my Lady, but I have to ask--Jon won’t talk to me about it at all--but are you, well. Are you having trouble conceiving?”

It takes her a moment to even process the question. _Conceiving of what?_ she thinks, first, and then her mind trips to the raven, a week ago, that brought news of the new Lady Manderly’s miscarried babe--a small mercy, at least, that there’s already an heir. And then Sam’s words settle into meaning. She feels herself start to gape; clenches her jaw. Relaxes it.

“We’re not,” she says, forcing herself to stand tall, to look the bright-red Sam in the eye. “We haven’t, Jon hasn’t--has he not told you himself?”

A bead of sweat rolls down Sam’s fleshy forehead. “Forgive me, my Lady,” he says, faltering, and then pushes on with visible effort. “I hadn’t talked about it with Jon. It seemed, well. Rude. And a lady knows her own body best, of course, but I thought, I have read a recent treatise from Braavos, an herb they use there, there are good results--”

“You should call me Sansa,” Sansa says. “After all, you call my husband Jon.”

“Forgive me, my Lady--Sansa--” Sam sighs. “Sansa. I know it isn’t my place, to ask. But without an heir--already, there are rumors growing, that the North will not remain long united. The people accept Tormund Giantsbane as lord of a tiny holding, but some say Jon means to name him heir, and they will not have a wildling rule the North, not yet, not this generation nor the next--they want a Stark in Winterfell, my lady. Sansa.”

“It would be a Targaryen,” Sansa says, to distract him. But like her, Sam knows that’s not true in any of the ways that matter.

“If you are scared,” he says, and now he’s looking at the floor again, “I know he’s a good--he is--there have been--he would be kind to you, my lady. Sansa.”

Sansa knows it’s true, and still-- _kind_ is hard to picture as anything but _not cruel_ , and that much is obvious. It would be--she could, with Jon. It would be all right. For a baby. For Winterfell, and the North.

“I’ll speak to him,” she says to Sam. He nods, biting his lip, still not quite meeting her eyes.

She takes the balm, and leaves him.

***

Sansa finds Jon alone in the armory, polishing the plain steel sword that came back with him from the wars in Longclaw’s place. He is careful with it, meticulous, so absorbed that it takes him a minute to look up and see her standing in front of him.

“From Sam, for your scar,” she says, and shows him the balm. 

“Thank you,” Jon says, “but I’m fine, it doesn’t hurt.”

“It bothers you,” Sansa says. “I’m not blind, Jon.”

“Other men have worse than this,” Jon says.

Sansa snorts, and hears a whisper from her mother, reprimanding her for it. “So self-sacrificing,” she says. “Of course, maybe you like to remind the men that you’re a great hero, wounded fighting to defend them--or maybe you think it’s dashing, rogue-like. Instead of what it is, a scar like one of a thousand others, that hurts you when it’s cold and scabs when you smile.”

“You won’t let this go until I used the gods-cursed balm, will you,” says Jon, annoyed. 

“No,” says Sansa. She smiles at him. “Your hands are covered in polish, so let me--”

“Get it over with, then,” says Jon, and tilts his face up towards her hands.

Sansa uncovers the small earthenware jar. The balm smells like her fleeting memories of summer: the tang of fresh-cut hay, the deep wetness of earth after a midday rain. Jon closes his eyes, and Sansa watches the fine lines around them ease, lines she hadn’t realized until now were even there. Is this what he looks like when he sleeps? Five years have fallen away, at least. The balm is cool and sweet against her fingers, and with her other hand she steadies Jon’s face, fingers pressed against his jaw. There, there are small rough hairs, and warmth.

Jon swallows as she touches the balm to where his scar starts, right below the eye. She sees his throat bob and relax. He breathes out as she eases into the tight scar tissue the way Sam’s note instructs, and she watches his lips part just slightly, red in the cold air of the armory. As she reaches the knottiest section of the scar, near the corner of his mouth, Jon makes a small noise somewhere deep in his throat, and Sansa--

“We should have a baby,” she says, and pulls her fingers away. It’s done.

Jon jerks, the tension that had been leaching so slowly out of him returned, all at once. 

“Who told you that?” he asks.

“No one,” Sansa says, stung. It's a lie, of course, but it feels true--now that Sam has put the thought it her mind, she can see the rightness of it. _I should have seen it,_ she thinks. To have missed the obvious necessity of an heir--it’s failing her people, her duty. 

“Winterfell needs an heir,” she says to Jon now, to make up for it. “The North is still fragile. And we all need something to celebrate.”

A baby. New life, more proof of spring. She can remember Rickon as a baby, just: tiny hands, a whorl of hair, lusty bright cries.

But Jon is looking at her with horror.

“I won't--” he starts, stops. “There are other ways--”

But there aren't, not really, not if they want this fragile new peace to grow. Sansa tries to say as much, but Jon just sheathes the sword and stands, armed.

“I won't discuss this,” he says. “Sansa. I will never--”

She leaves before he can finish. She feels hot and blurry, a roil of emotions warring inside her: loss, anger, a sick relief.

A crack: she’s clenched her fists hard enough to break the tiny jar of balm, and it weeps out through her white-knuckled fingers. The smell of summer is everywhere, mocking her, and when she makes it back to her rooms she orders a bath hot enough to scald and scrubs her skin until it's raw and blank.

***

Jon must have gotten it out of Sam somehow, because he is silent and stony at meal times all the next week, and he doesn't speak to Sam at all.

Even the presence of Lyanna Mormont, whose visit Sansa has been looking forward to for a fortnight, does little to relieve the tension. The young Lady is fierce and loyal but not skilled overmuch in small talk, and she looks curiously from Sansa to Jon to Sam and back again, pointed face shrewd. 

The next morning, Sansa walks along the battlements with Lady Mormont, pointing out the progress of repairs, the way they have arranged for double shifts of archers at the weak spots. She asks after Mormont’s banner men, her maester.

“We are all doing well at Bear Island, thank you for asking,” says the girl, in her odd, formal way. “Of course I will need to marry soon, and then you will have more to ask me about. If you and Lord Snow had a boy, I could marry him. I would like that: he would only be a baby, and would not bother me for years, and I would tell him what to do when he got older.”

Sansa laughs out loud despite herself. “I will keep that plan in mind,” she amends, when Lady Mormont frowns.

“It is a good plan,” the lady says. “But first you need to have a boy. You are young and healthy, and I know how people get babies. It's an important part of ruling, getting babies. Do you not like Jon Snow? You were very cold at supper last night, and he was sad. I'm sure he's very handsome, if you care about that sort of thing.”

Lyanna Mormont, it's clear from her tone of voice, has little patience for women who care about that sort of thing. She wouldn't have had any patience at all for the girl Sansa was at her age.

“Men tend to care very much about that sort of thing, Lady Mormont,” she says, “even when they should not--so don't be so hard on women who only want the same considerations. You're right, Lord Snow is handsome. But he's kind too, which matters more.”

“And he has a good mind for command,” says the lady, “although yours is better for politics, they say.” These, it’s obvious, are what Lady Mormont looks for in a match. 

“But if he is kind and good and all of that, why are you fighting? I must ask,” she says, looking a little ashamed, “even if it is rude. If the Warden of the North and the Lord Snow dislike each other, it will affect Bear Island, you see.”

“Your sense of duty is admirable,” Sansa says. “But I do like Jon, and he likes me. We--sometimes people disagree, and fight, but I promise Bear Island is safe from our tempers.”

“See that it is,” says Lyanna Mormont, and looks out over the battlements towards where her duty lies, miles and miles away..

And it will be, Sansa promises herself. Even if Jon cannot stand the thought of having a child with her, after all--after Ramsay, and the dark part that grew in her and saved her from him--there are other ways to get an heir. She thinks of Tyrion and new laws that offer choice instead of the inevitability of birth. She thinks of Lady Mormont, her ironclad sense of duty and loyalty and strength. There may not always be a Stark in Winterfell, but there could be another woman of the North, and she would hold it well.

A part of her wants to go to Jon and tell him this, to break the new cold silence between them with this compromise. But then she sees the horror on his face again, and the dark place rises fierce and angry inside of her. So he doesn't want her: let him worry, then, about the future of Winterfell. When he wants a solution, he can come to her and ask.

For the child Lyanna’s sake, though, she speaks kindly to Jon at the table that night, and coaxes him to tell Lady Mormont the now-familiar story of Sam and the Walker. Already she can see how it will grow into a legend, a new generation of nurses’ tales told by the fire. There's no better audience than Lady Mormont, who combines a child’s love of stories with a commander’s appreciation for clever, unlikely victory. And Sansa notices the way Jon’s helplessly proud telling brings a happy blush to Sam’s face.

When Jon rises to turn in for the night, this night, Sansa follows him. 

In the long, silent hallway that leads to the living quarters, Jon hears her coming. He stops and turns, opens his mouth as if to speak, but Sansa cuts him off. She can feel the words as they leave her mouth, bitter.

“It's just for show. Lyanna Mormont asked me today why you haven't gotten a baby on me--and she's only a child. People will talk, Jon. The least we can do it make it look like we’re trying: better pitying gossip than gleeful rumors.”

Lemon rind, the tang of vinegar: she's always liked bitter flavors, and she lets herself savor this little bit of strategy.

Jon nods. He's not stupid: he must know the rightness of what she's saying. 

“The servants, in the morning,” he starts, but she's thought of that.

“You should sleep in my chamber, from now on,” she says. Her maids are loyal, but they gossip like all serving girls: it's a helpful combination. 

“You're right,” Jon says. It sounds like a confession. She still doesn't know where he's been sleeping, all this time.

He follows her down the corridor, silent, a step behind her all the way. The last time a man was in her rooms it was Ramsay. She thinks about the sounds the dogs made as they tore into his flesh. She remembers the clang of iron on the bars of his cell. He died screaming and she is alive and in the lead, and here they are, heavy wooden doors in front of her: she opens them, and lets Jon follow her inside. 

She dresses for bed behind a screen, and when she emerges Jon has taken off his cloak and doublet and sits on the edge of the bed in shirtsleeves and breeches. For the first time tonight, he looks straight at her.

“I’ll do whatever you need,” he says, and she knows he means sleeping arrangements tonight but there's a pleading note in his voice, as though he means more, or everything. _Don’t be stupid_ , she tells herself, angry.

“I need you to sleep in the bed,” she says, and gets under the covers herself. Usually she lies in the center of the wide mattress, spreading out. But tonight there is Jon to avoid: his warmth and careful breathing. He gets in gingerly and turns away from her, curling onto his side, and after a moment of indecision she turns as well, to where she can see him even in the softening dark.

There are small soft hairs at the top of his neck, and a red mark that must be from a day spent in practice armor, that starts at his collarbone and vanishes just under the loose linen collar of his undershirt. There’s tension in his shoulders--he’s awake still, clearly, holding himself stiff and unmoving. She’ll watch until she sees him fall asleep, she thinks, and counts his breathing, the slight rise and fall of his side beneath the shirt in the dimness of the room.

A sudden shift of weight on the bed: Sansa startles, then sees the glowing eyes. Ghost.

“Gods--I forgot,” says Jon, sleepily. “Ghost--down.”

“It’s fine,” says Sansa, “really.” The glowing eyes blink, the weight shifts and settles. Her feet are warm, and again she looks at Jon’s back, the breathing, and waits. 

And then she blinks, and it’s morning. They’ve shifted in the night: Sansa on her back, now, and Jon on his front. He’s asleep: the burr that shows up sometimes in his voice is, here, a snore. One arm is flung across her stomach, and his face is pressed half onto her shoulder, near her neck. Sansa holds very still. 

His arm is warm, she thinks abstractly. The weight of it might feel like a cage but instead it presses pleasantly, and she can feel his breath wet against her skin where her nightgown has slipped down. His hair is a tangled, shining mass, and without thinking about it Sansa reaches for it. It’s rougher than she expected, and oddly warm, with the hotter plane of his scalp below--and then Jon shifts against her and murmurs, “G’morning,” voice low and threaded with an aching gladness that makes something turn painfully over inside her chest.

“Hush,” Sansa says senselessly, gentling her hand against his head. Jon makes another low noise and turns into her, like a dog curling tighter in front of the hearth.

His cheek is rough with stubble, and Sansa flinches at the scratch. 

All of a sudden Jon is awake, and pulling away from her. She sees his face go from warm and open to tight, shuttered. He fairly scrambles back from her, unwittingly taking the heavy covers with him as he goes, and the cold morning air hits Sansa like a slap.

“Sansa--” he starts, stumbling, evidently still just half-awake. “I didn't--”

“Nevermind,” she says to him, turning away. She would pull a blanket up to cover herself if there were any left for her: instead, she excavates her feet from the still-sleeping bulk of Ghost and climbs down from the bed. She cannot look at Jon--she focuses instead on finding her dressing gown, hurrying behind the screen. 

_Of course he didn’t want you,_ she thinks, and she should be relieved, she should be happy, he will leave her alone--he won’t ever touch her--but instead the dark place roils inside her, angry and ashamed, a trapped animal. 

“I’m sorry,” Jon says, softly. “Sansa, please.” 

Dressed, she composes herself and emerges, masked. Smiles at Jon. Takes his arm and walks with him to break their fasts, so that people will see them together and think what they need to think.


	2. Chapter 2

They cannot, of course, stop sharing her bed just because of one morning’s disaster. Already, Sansa can see it beginning to work--the whispers of the women, men’s mocking jokes, a servant’s hidden smile. 

The play has found its audience, and each night they perform it again. The walk to Sansa’s chambers, the careful stiff distance as they ease into sleep.

And, each morning, Sansa awakes touching Jon--or, truthfully, with Jon touching her. Often, like the first morning, his arm is thrown around her--or his foot curls over hers, twining at the ankle. One morning his fingers are tangled, somehow, in a fistful of her hair.

It should make her pull away, scream, run. That he moves towards her in the night, when she doesn’t know--can’t stop him? Instead, impossibly, she savors it. She lies unmoving, feeling the small flares of warmth in the places where they touch, and the deeper, sweeter warmth that grows achingly within her, and counts the long and precious seconds until Jon’s breathing begins to change. Only then does Sansa extricate herself--carefully, gently, so that he does not know. So that--so that he won’t stop this. So that she can have it again, tomorrow.

She lives in this fragile, fleeting lie for two weeks, until one morning she wakes too late, not before Jon but with him, in one breath, and they both realize it: their careless tangle, and the warmth. Like the first morning, there is slow dawning in Jon’s eyes, and then shuttering, the pulling away. Again, the cold air as it seeps into the space where he was. 

Maybe Sansa is not quite awake yet herself, or maybe the last two weeks have weakened her, made her soft and needy. Whatever it is, though, this time she hears her own voice before she can help it-- “Stay,” a single word.

“I’m cold,” she tries, after, to reason with--him? Herself? She cannot pull back the want, now that it’s out there. And she _is_ cold, and he was so warm.

“Are you sure?” Jon asks, so carefully. He is a foot away from her, arms extended to hold himself off the bed, as though ready to spring away at the slightest movement from her. Sansa holds perfectly still. She looks at the sheets between them, at the warp and weft of thread, at a small tear that needs repairing.

“Please,” she says, and is surprised when it doesn’t feel like begging. 

“Sansa,” says Jon, with something in his voice that Sansa can’t parse, a slow thickness that is different than sleepiness. “Yes--anything you want. I was afraid--”

 _Not anything_ , Sansa thinks. Instead she says, “so come back,” and Jon does.

It is different now that they’ve both acknowledged it, however haltingly. They don’t slide back together faultlessly. There is Jon’s hand hovering over its previous place on her hip, hesitant and levitating, until Sansa moves into it and captures it there. 

And now she has him, and doesn’t know what to do with him--they lie there, barely breathing, and there is still an hour before the maids will come to wake them. 

_Worth fucking waking up again,_ she hears in her head, an echo of Tormund from months ago. Jon is here now, and awake, and there is so much she still doesn’t know.

“Tell me about how it was, when you first arrived at Castle Black,” she says, starting from the beginning. 

And to her surprise Jon tells--that morning and the ones that follow, lying carefully next to her. He talks slowly, about the things he did and saw, and who he was, and when he starts to go away Sansa moves her body closer to his, or tugs a curl of his hair where it lies beside her on the pillow. She brings him back, piece by piece, until it is a more complete Jon that turns to her one morning and asks for one of her stories, from the beginning. 

And, lying there in the warmth and carefulness of the bed they’ve made, Sansa tells him. 

***

A month passes, and it is a good one. Four more babes are born, and one is named for Brienne, which makes her blush and stammer. The fields are thawed enough, now, for planting to begin in earnest, and Sam has more fun than any person rightfully should pouring over ancient tomes on crop cycles and soil nutrients. 

Tormund comes back from Last Hearth, and begins to woo Brienne in earnest--bringing her a deer carcass like it’s a bundle of wildflowers, and doing his own blushing and stammering when she kisses him on the cheek for it. 

Sansa watches them, amused and happy, only slightly preoccupied with the question of who might be the new Master-at-Arms if Brienne goes off to Last Hearth in the end. Perhaps Alaya Ghent’s husband? There are still too few capable fighting men, let alone experts. Jon can take over for a while, she decides, and besides it’s unlikely that Brienne will do anything the traditonal way--marriage and caring for her husband’s household included. 

It is lighter out later every day now, and they set up long tables in the central courtyard and eat outside, sometimes, glorying in the growing evidence that winter really has left them be. Jon brings firecrackers one night--Sansa suspects he asked Sam to make them up for him--and hands them out to all the children over 7, then sits back and watches as they run around laughing and screaming with joy. 

Tormund finds Sansa as she inspects the armory the next day.

“I can see a change in Jon,” he says. “He isn’t so lost anymore. I don’t know what you did, but thank you.”

She expects a ribald joke about their marriage bed, but Tormund is uncharacteristically serious. He was worried about Jon too, she realizes--maybe more than she was, even. He knew more of the things that Jon has told her so slowly and recently, and he saw who Jon was, and wasn’t, before he had any time to recover at all.

“Thank you,” she says. “I’m glad you see it. I worried I’d been imagining it, a little.”

“Nay,” says Tormund, “he’s more real, now. More alive. He was--they brought him back, but he was never really here, not in the same way, and he’s making his way back, now.”

And then, blinking furiously, Tormund gathers Sansa in a quick and strangling hug, and leaves.

***

The next day brings less glad tidings: news of bandits near Deepwood Motte, or maybe raiders, for they have boats moored on the coast, too close to Bear Island for comfort. There are 150 of them, maybe more, a force large enough to cause concern that raiders _and_ bandits have joined forces for some nefarious purpose.

“The Wolfswood is teeming with bandits,” says Brienne, “and we’ve needed to clear them out for months now, kept putting it off because we barely had soldiers to speak of. They’ve gotten comfortable, my lady. Think we’ll just let them be.”

Sansa turns to Jon for his opinion.

“We do barely have soldiers to speak of,” he shrugs. “The wildling forces have left, mostly--we’ve the men Tormund came here with, and Winterfell’s own guard, but it’s not much of an army yet. 100 horses, maybe. I don’t think we should go off chasing bandits just to teach a lesson--we don’t know, yet, that they’re planning anything more than a cattle raid or two.”

“150 bandits don’t join up together for a cattle raid,” says Brienne. 

Sansa sighs. Brienne is right, but so is Jon--it could be a trap, meant to lure the fighting men out of Winterfell and west into the wilds of the Wolfswood, with no easy route back in case of attack. Still, though, Winterfell is meant to protect the North, and that means not ignoring the threats that appear.

“Send riders tonight to Deepwood Motte and Bear Island,” she says. “Let them know that we are coming, and to gather the men they can to help us clear the bandits. Let our men set out tomorrow night--make ready. But don’t waste time with the Wolfswood--just get there, and back. We can go bandit-hunting and lesson-teaching when we’ve an army again.”

Jon and Brienne nod at her, and it is done. Sansa can only hope that she’s made the right choice, and trust that they would tell her if she was wrong. 

***

“You look lost in thought,” says Jon, as they ready for bed that night. They talk more easily now, and not just in the mornings. When they lie down together, they no longer hold themselves artificially apart--Jon curls into Sansa, and her arm goes automatically around him. They have never talked about this, since that halting morning when she said that she was cold, as though to speak of it will break the spell and they will lose this most precious thing.

Sansa buries her face in the curls at Jon’s nape and speaks into the back of his neck.

“I was just thinking that ruling means choosing the right people to do the things you can’t,” she says. “I don’t know--it sounds obvious, saying it out loud. But I used to think it meant being brilliant, outsmarting your enemies. And I realized, tonight, how much of it’s just trust.”

“Aye,” says Jon, and Sansa knows now the way his burr thickens when he’s nearing sleep, when he’s comfortable and at ease. She smiles.

“Command’s the same, mostly,” Jon says. “Not to underestimate strategy, and all of that. But you’ve got to know who has your back.”

Sansa, at his back, watches him off to sleep.

***

In the night, they have turned: Sansa wakes to Jon at her back, now, his arm around her. He has pulled her close, so that she nestles into him. And his hand--it rests right below her breast, so that she can feel the brush of his thumb through the thin cotton of her night shift, a flare of painful heat against the soft skin there. 

Sansa realizes that she woke because she is aching, as though her bleeding is about to start--but the ache is lower, at the junction of her thighs, not in her womb. The heat of Jon’s hand is coursing through her, and her breast feels too full, ripe, where it touches him. She wants--

She shouldn’t want anything. Shouldn’t want to disrupt this careful peace they’ve made, the safe place for themselves that they have finally carved. Shouldn’t want a man’s touch anywhere on her body, shouldn’t hope that by moving just so she can get Jon’s hand to where she wants it, cupping her, holding her.

Sansa bites back her need and arches, just trying to ease some of the tension and ache. Just a slight movement, but it is backwards, against Jon where he lies behind her, and two things happen at once.

Jon groans and shifts, pulling her closer again, but this time his hand is higher and he is grasping her in his palm, his big rough hand against her. At the same time, she feels him move his hips closer, and knows--can feel--that he is hard. She can feel where he rubs against her, the length of him on her backside, the shocking heat of it.

The terrible part is that Sansa wants him. She knows it in one blazing moment: the dark part inside her revels in it, crows it to the skies. The ache surges through her again, and she cannot help it--she arches into Jon’s touch, just slightly, and moans at the feel of him.

And then everything breaks: Jon hears her and wakes, in pieces, confusion and apology chasing their tails around him. He snatches his hand from her like it’s been burned, his “I’m sorry” hanging in the air as he moves away from her, as he sits up and takes everything in: the painful want on her face, the way they were lying, how hard he is.

“Gods,” Jon says, something awful in his voice. “I’m so sorry--Sansa--”

“It’s okay,” she tries to tell him, but he’s leaving already, getting dressed in a blur.

“Jon,” she tries, one last time, feeling everything slipping away. He turns, at last, towards her.

“It’s fine, Jon,” she says, trying to make him know, but the words are wrong, and he will not look her in the eyes. 

***

The door closes behind him, and Sansa lies in the middle of the empty bed. She should be--doing something, she thinks vaguely, but pushing aside the necessity of action, the tragedy of loss, is the ache she still feels. 

Experimentally, she raises her own hand to her breast, moves her thumb against the underside and then up to her nipple where it is taught and almost painful. It’s not as good as Jon’s, but it still sends need coursing through her and back down to the central ache and wetness at her cunt.

She rubs herself again, harder, and with her other hand she lets her fingers explore the way she used to many lifetimes ago, when she dreamed about princes. Now she thinks of Jon, who could have been a prince but walked away from it, walked all the way back to the North, and to her. She feels the heat and nub of herself and jerks at her own touch, how good it is.

Sansa’s eyes close, and she falls into the feeling--the rhythm of her own touch, and the memory of Jon’s. The feeling of him hard against her, which the dark part of her welcomed and wanted, that need--she is wetter now, sopping, and she moves her hand from her breast to thrust two fingers into her cunt, as deep as she can. She comes like that, hands covered in her own wetness, crying out with the joy and release of it.

She falls asleep, afterwards, and when she wakes it is morning, and Jon and the first scouts have left for Deepwood Motte.

***

With most of the men and Brienne gone, it is like the war--just her there, and her women, and the tasks of daily life. Repairs go forward with able-bodied women acting as carpenters while the few archers left behind stand on the walls. There are gardens this time, though, in the warmth of spring, and new strawberries for pie, and a hope that was missing before.

The weeks pass uneventfully, for the most part. Sansa does not think of Jon during the day, beyond her talks with Sam about the ravens he sends and the successful routing of the raiders. The men take another week, to visit with Bear Island. Sam and the gardeners plant tomatoes.

Sansa thinks of Jon at night. She doesn’t want to--she would like to hate him, for leaving her, for not wanting her. But she does, again and again, leaving herself gasping and wet and still wanting. 

She does not need Jon, not to feel pleasure, not to rule Winterfell. But she wants him here, for both. She wants him home.

She wishes she could talk to someone about it--to Brienne, but Brienne is away fighting. To Sam, but Sam can barely look her in the eye without blushing when he’s talking about the grain stores. It takes her by surprise, then, when she finds herself pouring out her feelings to him regardless, over dinner. They are the only two left at the high table, and she thinks that maybe they are both lonely.

“I feel like I shouldn’t want it,” she says. “I felt, after Ramsay--I thought that part of me was razed and salted, that instead I had a dark and empty place. And I _liked_ it, my dark place. But somehow, that place--it’s still there. I’m still dark, in there, but I also want it--him--Jon. I don’t know how I can be both of those things at once. I don’t understand how there’s room.”

She stops, feeling the blood rise to her face. Rambling like an idiot. But Sam smiles at her kindly, through his sweat and blush.

“I don’t know, my lady--Sansa,” he says. “We Maesters are trained in the health of the body, not the mind, although there are some new treatises by a Maester Brighttree that are very interesting--anyhow. I think that, really, people grow. We change. Sometimes we make room.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Sansa. “Jon doesn’t want it, I don’t think.” Her goblet of wine is warming in her hands as they sweat. She can’t look at Sam.

“Not want you, my lady?” Sam asks, voice warm. “Perhaps you should ask him about that yourself. I can’t speak for Jon.” 

“Thank you anyhow, Sam,” Sansa says, getting up. “This--thank you.”

“When he gets back, my--Sansa,” says Sam, and blushes again. “You might try asking him.”

Sansa doesn’t think she can do it--to face humiliation a third time, from Jon. But the first two weren’t so very bad, a voice inside her says. He didn’t hate you. And what is embarrassment, of all the things that can happen to a person?

So perhaps she will talk to Jon. When he gets back--but know one knows, yet, when that will be.

***

It is the stupidest possible accident: Tolly Moss, just five years old, steals a candle from the kitchens when no one is looking and takes it to practice using his father’s flint. In the firewood storehouse. It has been a dry two weeks, and the small blaze Tolly starts scares him so much that he runs and hides in the stables, and that is how an entire storehouse full of a year’s worth of wood burns down in a matter of hours.

 _Stupid_ , Sansa thinks, as she passes buckets of water down the line of every able-bodied person in Winterfell not on critical guard duty. They are well-trained and have caught it quickly, and the firebreaks were dug well. It’s unlikely they will lose more than this storehouse and perhaps another two, but with them go months of work on the part of the men who felled and cut these trees, who re-built these storehouses from their burned-out husks less than a year before. _I should have seen it,_ she thinks. Should have had an eye on Tolly, on the kitchens, on every building in the fort.

Alaya Ghent, next to her, heaves her bucket to the next woman down the line and turns to Sansa, squaring her shoulders. Her babe is tied across her chest, a wet piece of cloth over his face to protect him from the smoke. 

“I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “It was a stupid accident, my lady. _Accident_. You’ve done a good job here--no one could have done better. And look--it’s working.” 

Alaya gestures to the lines of people, mostly women in their skirts and aprons, handing down buckets in efficient order. Sansa extended fire-fight drills to include women soon after she took charge of Winterfell, and ordered bucket stashes to be kept in all buildings. Already the original blaze is only a smoulder, and it looks like no other storehouses will be entirely lost. Columns of smoke rise up, wringing the castle with grey and ash, but the flames are gone, and the danger is past. 

Until a new danger announces itself, with no time for pause between. An alarm: the few guards left on the walls ring out short blasts--a lone rider approaching, at a gallop. No banners. Sansa tosses her bucket aside and runs up the battlements, cursing her soaked skirts as she does. At the top, her archers are readying themselves, training arrows at the man below who will not stop to identify himself. He is almost within range. If he slips past them, sees how under-manned they are with all their fighting forces out with Jon at Deepwood Motte, if he is a scout who reports back about Winterfell’s vunerability, its ripeness--

“Draw,” Sansa says, still deep in the rhythm of the fire-fight, the mindless need to save her home. The archers draw, their longbows creaking with the effort.  
And then she sees it--a flash of white, behind the rider. 

“Stand down,” she shouts, panicking. “Stand _down_!”

The flash of white is Ghost. The rider, Jon.

“Open the gates,” Sansa says, trying to will calm back into her voice. “It is Lord Snow, returned.”

She goes to meet him, ash and smoke in her hair, skirts half-soaked and half-burned. Waits by the gates as they creak open and watches as he gallops the last few lengths home, thundering into the courtyard. 

He swings down off his horse, all black furs and searching eyes, and she walks over to him and slaps him once, hard, across the face. 

Then Sansa turns, steels herself before the shocked eyes of the people watching, and clings to control with every shred of will she has as she makes her way past their searching eyes and indoors. It is only in her chamber that she finally lets herself sob, wracking cries that carry her into exhaustion and then, finally, to sleep.

***

When Sansa wakes it is to the confusion of timelessness--the sky the half-dark of evening, but there are none of the sounds of people making ready for the night. Instead, there is a soft quiet and a few bird calls. Not evening, then, but earliest morning. She has slept for hours.

Slipping out of her filthy and burned skirts and into her oldest cotton shift, Sansa notes that Jon has not been here: the bed is untouched on his side, his clothing nowhere to be found. Thinking of him, she feels anew the piercing fear and anger at his stupidity, at her own brush with annihilation. If she had--

She puts the thought away. 

It is warmer outside than she is used to for this time of morning, a chill that is closer to bracing than icy. She wanders in the quiet, drawn towards the site of yesterday’s first disaster. As she nears it she hears noises, dragging, and a man’s low curses. A scene reveals itself out of the morning twilight: Jon, alone, with logs in hand, shoving them into some poor approximation of a foundation.

“We have carpenters who actually know how to do this, you know,” she says, startling him. Jon looks at her, runs an ash-blackened hand through his blacker hair. 

“Of course,” he says. “I just--I couldn’t leave it.”

“Sit,” says Sansa, and does so herself, right on one of Jon’s logs.

She will not apologize to him, for any of it.

Instead, “Jon,” she asks, “how could you? Your men--no banners, and the archers, we were all so scared still from the fire--”

“Gods, Sansa.” Jon sits down beside her. “I was--when I saw the smoke, it was like the whole world fell away. I was back in Castle Black, knowing that something terrible was happening to Winterfell, to _you_ , and this time I thought, ‘I won’t let it happen again, I won’t sit here and wait for the news--’”

His eyes start to go somewhere dark and far away, and Sansa puts her hand on his to guide him back. Jon blinks a little, clearing, and looks at where they are joined. 

“All I could think was that I had to get to you. I left my men, I didn’t even say a word to them, I just took off. I forgot all of it--banners, archers, distance. There was just you, and the smoke.”

He is looking at her face now, and it is too much. He looks--hungry. Starved. 

“You were almost _shot_ ,” she says, angry. Furious. “We were fine here, _fine_. I told you about the new fire protocols, you’ve seen the drills. I would not let Winterfell burn on my watch, Jon, never. You have to trust me--you can’t come flying back every time you see some smoke in the air!”

“I know,” says Jon, “I know, I know, Sansa, but I couldn’t think--I didn’t think--”

He takes a breath as though to stop himself, and can’t. He is still talking, a jumble of words.

“I just needed to see you, I had to _see_ , please--” and he is cracking, she can see him breaking apart in front of her, and she does the only thing she can think to hold him together: presses her lips to his, right at the corner of his mouth where his scar starts, as though crack on face and crack in soul are the same and she can soothe them both. 

His lips are warm, and then she presses into him again and he opens to her and they are wet, and hot, and she cannot stop: the smell of smoke in the air and the live-wire joy of his mouth beneath hers, the sweetest thing. 

He pulls away, once, and she thinks he’ll leave, close himself off to her as he has again and again, and she will pull herself tightly together and go on. But no--his hands come up to tangle in her hair, loose around her shoulders, and he doesn’t shutter himself away. He looks at her wide, wide open, layed out, and asks if she is sure. 

“You idiot,” she says, and loves him. “I am, are you?”

“Never surer,” says Jon, gently. “Sansa, love,” and then he is guiding her back to him, and she is home. 

***

They stay like that, in the sweetness and the heated rush of this new embrace, until the bells mark the start of the day. Breaking apart, Jon lingers, a handful of Sansa’s hair clutched in his fist as though he cannot bear to let it go. He is beginning to look wild again, something hunted edging at his face.

“You’ve work to do,” Sansa tells him, firmly. Inside she is wild too, dark in a new and wonderful way. But she is good at hiding things, by now. 

“Go on, Jon--to work. I’ve work to do too, you know,” and she is laughing now, because she is so happy and she’s nowhere else to put it all. 

He sighs, and smiles ruefully, and lets her go.

“I’ll see you, then,” he says, like a young lad to the maid he’s courting, and Sansa gives in and kisses him once more, and then she is clinging, and throbbing with it, his hands dipping to her waist and steadying her there--

Until a kitchen maid passes and they break apart, caught.

Sansa walks back to her rooms to change, seeing and hearing nothing except the pulsing of her own blood. This is the world made new, again: it has been remade more times than she likes to count, each time darker and smaller and meaner. And now it has broken open and she feels--as if the dark place inside her has stretched to fill her, and thinned in doing so, so that somehow all of her feels soaked and deepened in something that is not dark but rich, full-blooded.

The day passes in a blur. Sansa pities the petitioners who came to her today, for who knows what she gave them--she will have to ask Sam to read his notes back to her, and make redress to those she could have served better. Had she been able to think. 

Helping with the gardens works better, because she can focus on her hands in the dirt and the rhythm of weeding, and then it is time for dinner. She cleans herself carefully, dresses in her favorite deep green. 

At dinner she sits beside Jon, and does not turn to look at him--she focuses her attention on Brienne, and Tormund. Hearing how the campaign went, how things are in Deepwood and on Bear Island. The whole time, though, she can feel Jon beside her as though he’s made of glowing coals. She fears she will sweat through her dress. The press of his knee against her makes her nearly knock her wine goblet over, and then she must avoid Sam’s curious eyes. Jon says something, and she can't avoid turning to listen to him: their eyes meet once and there is so much fierce want in the depths of his that Sansa finally gives up, excuses herself with exhaustion.

She stops to catch her breath in the hall, leaning back against the cool stones. Gods, she has sweated through her dress--and not just that. She’s aching already, and her cunt is leaking. Her thighs and smallclothes are wet, soaking, and she must still make it all the way back to her rooms, and change, and--

And then Jon is there in front of her. 

“I had to say I had indigestion,” he says. “Tormund laughed at me, and Sam offered me some awful concoction that he’ll probably force on me tomorrow. The poor cook apologized.”

“You could have waited,” says Sansa. They both know it’s so impossible as to be a lie. There is no prolonging this anymore.

“Sansa,” says Jon, and reaches for her, runs his thumb along her cheek and cups her head. Sansa's breath catches, a brief moment where the world stills--and then they are kissing, and all of this morning’s sweetness has become a fierce urgency, ripened by the day they’ve had to wait. She is melting with it, soaked through again, and it is still not enough.

When Jon pulls back, Sansa makes a panicked, needing noise--there is a flash of thought that he will leave her again, and she cannot, she will not let him.

“No, love, no,” Jon is saying, whispering in her ear as his hands anchor her at the waist. He cannot keep them still, though--they are roaming, and she feels him cup a breast and hold her there, then thumb her nipple through the layers of fabric just like she’s imagined all these nights.

“I won’t have our first time be here, in the hallway, Sansa,” and he is kissing her neck, and his other hand is on her backside, rucking up the fabric of her skirts little by little. “You deserve a bed, and time.”

But what Sansa deserves and what she has have never been the same, and she doesn't care, in this moment, for anything except what she wants. And here he is, in front of her, soaked in pleasure, and she will not be gentle or easy or good. 

“I won’t wait,” Sansa says, helping him where his hand is already working her skirts, “not a second longer, Jon, do you hear me--not a second, I need you, _now_ \--gods--” because Jon is nodding now, agreeing, saying “anything, anything,” and then her skirts are up, a heavy bundle between them, and Jon is finding her soaking smallclothes and groaning at the feel. 

“Since dinner,” she whispers to him, “since before, maybe,” and Jon’s breeches are down, she can feel him hot and hard in her hand, and she aches again. Jon curses out loud, and his fingers slip wetly against her and she does not want to come, not without him inside her, and tell him that--which makes him groan again, so loudly that servants might hear them. Sansa cannot find it in herself to care. Let them see, let them all see Jon hoisting her up against the wall, just slightly, she is almost tall enough without it, and burying his head in her neck as he enters her. It feels like--like this is all she’s ever needed, and he is finally giving it to her. She cries out with it, and then his fingers are back on her cunt and she cannot even make noise, can barely breathe, can’t do anything but feel the way he is in her, around her, soothing the ache and worsening it at the same time until it is unbearable and it bursts, coming in waves, leaving her half-sobbing and half-laughing into Jon’s curls as he jerks and cries and fills her. 

They make it from there to her bedroom, somehow--Jon keeps trying to stop to kiss her, and Sansa has to pull him on down the hall. She has lost a shoe, and maybe more. Jon’s shirt is half-off, his belt abandoned. She still wants him. 

And then in bed: “Your turn, now,” Sansa says to Jon, smiling. “A bed, and time?”

Jon kisses her fiercely, and then undresses her with all the gentleness and care he abandoned in the hallway, just because she asked him to. His fingers shake on her lacings.

 _He will do anything I ask,_ she realizes. She already knows. 

When he has finished undressing her, finished kissing every part of her body that touched his so cautiously all those nights, he settles between her legs. 

“Can I?” Jon asks, and Sansa nods. He sighs with want and pleasure, and she props herself up on her arms to watch: the way he spreads her folds apart just to look, at first. 

“Oh gods, Sansa,” he says, voice rough and low, “I can see myself inside you--from before--” and the thought makes Sansa pulse with unexpected want. Jon licks into her, there, where he must be able to taste himself, and Sansa groans--the idea of it, the image in front of her, Jon’s dark eyes searching her as he licks, the feeling of it. He brings her closer and closer, and then slides two fingers into her just as he sucks the nub of her into his mouth--and she crests, grabbing two fistfuls of his hair before she can stop herself and grinding his face into her, more, more, everything. 

When she floats back into the world Jon is beside her, hard again, and she finds she still wants him. Wonders if she will ever stop. 

“I should have asked,” Jon says, before she can reach for him again. “Before--in the hallway. I know what you said earlier, about a baby, but do you truly--just because Sam suggested something, doesn’t mean it needs to happen. Not even for an heir. We can figure that out in other ways.”

He rolls towards her, kisses one eyelid, so carefully, and then the other. “Only what you want, love. Anything you want--all of it--but only that.”

“And where do you come in?” asks Sansa. “What if what I want is what you want? Or what you don’t want?”

“Then I’ll tell you,” says Jon. “I promise, Sansa. I’m sorry I was--such an idiot, as you’re always reminding me. I should have talked to you. I didn’t want to make things harder, didn’t want to force you to pretend, or choose, or--but I will talk to you, now. I’ll tell you what I want.”

“And we’ll decide, together,” says Sansa. “I’d like a baby, but if you don’t--”

But Jon is looking at her like she’s the god, and he the mortal. Like he is seeing something miraculous, right in front of him.

“I’d like that,” he says, “very much--” and then they are both laughing, and kissing, and Sansa is rolling him over so that she can sit astride him and sink down onto him, watch his awe as she takes her pleasure from him, and gives him his. 

***

In the morning, no servants will meet their eyes. Tormund winks at her, and Sam blushes even harder than usual. 

“I told you so, my lady,” he says. 

“Sansa, Sam, please,” Sansa answers, and goes to see how the garden is doing. There are new plants in a small plot, on the periphery, ones she doesn’t know. 

“Flowers, my lady,” says the gardener, poor Tolly’s father.

“Larkspur, and lupine, and daffodils, and snowdrops. Thought they might be pretty. Been a long time since I’ve seen a larkspur.”

“It’s a good idea,” Sansa tells him, smiling. There will be some beauty here, soon. It’ll be a nice reminder for people long used to war and monsters, deprivation and disaster: beauty for its own sake, things that give pleasure as their crop. 

“Let me know when they blossom,” she tells Torhold Moss, although she’ll know it--she checks this garden every day. He nods at her seriously, though, and she nods back, and then she goes to check the rest of Winterfell’s new growth.


	3. Epilogue

There is one last question. And one night, finally, she asks him. 

“If I’m the Stark in Winterfell and the Warden of the North, Jon, then--what are you? What do you want to be?” She wants him to ask for something, anything: she wants to give it to him, the more impossible the better. 

“I’m Jon,” he says, quietly, lips pressing into her hair just above her ear. “I’ve been a bastard and a lord and a prince--” and a god, thinks Sansa, and believes it: the power that’s always banked within him, resting now. Resting forever, if she has any say. 

She brings his hand up from where it’s resting on her stomach and smoothes out the calloused fingers, looks at the lines on the palm. Feels his pulse, steady, at the wrist, and breathes out.

“Go on,” she says, and Jon’s lips press warm against her temple.

“And I’ve been dead, and I’ve lived,” he says, and his body against hers is warm, so warm, “and that’s what I am now: I’m alive, and I’m yours. This is what I want--this bed, and you in it--this is all I am, love--”

Sansa rolls to face him, smoothes the dark curls from his cheek, tangles her fingers there and presses her mouth to his. He opens for her kiss and then pulls back, searching.

“--Is it enough? I know you wanted a prince, when we were little, a hero like the legends, and for you, if you wanted--”

“Idiot,” says Sansa, pushing down the rush of fear that erupts at the thought of Jon going back to those dark places where heroes dwell, doing anything but staying where he belongs beside her.

“I want you, here and alive,” she says, fierce, biting the words against his lips until she feels him gasp. “You have one duty, Jon Snow, and it’s to live, and to be happy doing it, as much as you possibly can--”

“Not such a burden,” says Jon, rolling them over, kissing down her throat, pausing at each collarbone, trailing kisses between her breasts. At her stomach he stops, rests his head and looks up at her through dark tangles of hair. She brushes it back, and he smiles, her cousin-brother-husband. Her own secret, fiercely guarded god. 

“Jon,” she says, soft and happy, and he laughs, and makes his way downwards, and then they are both lost to worship.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings:
> 
> This story contains implied references to Sansa's repeated rape by Ramsay Bolton. It also contains her growing sexual attraction to Jon, and her complicated feelings about how to reconcile those two things. I am not trying to speak for sexual assault survivors in any way in the writing of this fictional story, but I do delve into my own imagining of some of Sansa's thoughts and decisions around her past assault. If you think that reading this story given those broad outlines would be harmful to your mental health or well-being, please do step away!


End file.
